As 2024 comes to a close, we are reflecting on accomplishments and the good work of City Connects and the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children.
Our proudest moments are often in the special relationships built between City Connects Coordinators, students, families, and teachers and in the partnerships that Coordinators facilitate between schools and community organizations that bring warm clothing, eyeglasses, new experiences and joy to students. These are the accomplishments that inspire us to celebrate the growth of City Connects and its impacts on research, practice, and policy. This year, we celebrate:
- The launch of the National Centre for City Connects Ireland.
- The launch of a dashboard which uses City Connects data to help communities better respond to the needs and interests of students.
- The publication of our latest Progress Report.
- Two studies that deepen our understanding about the efficacy of City Connects and the need for integrated student support to help close opportunity gaps for children.
- Asking big questions, like what it takes for all children to thrive in an age of uncertainty and how policies can better reflect the research on child development and learning.
Join us as we look back at these accomplishments in more detail.
Celebrating 25 years
This school year marks 25 years of City Connects. As we celebrate this moment, we are proud of the impacts we have on the lives of children, families, and communities and the many partners who work with us to make a difference.
In this blog post, we discuss City Connects’ origins and how we continue the mission Mary Walsh envisioned two decades ago: building the village around each child so they can learn and thrive.
A New National Centre for City Connects
The National Centre for City Connects Ireland (NCCCI) launched May 30 and is based at Mary Immaculate College (MIC) in Limerick.
The new National Centre will enable staff at Mary Immaculate College to provide local technical and research support to Dublin’s City Connects schools, and allow City Connects to scale in Ireland.
“NCCCI’s launch is the culmination of five years of piloting, testing, and refining the City Connects model,” Mary Walsh, City Connects’ Executive Director, says in this Boston College news story. “The Irish educational community widely acknowledges the program’s success in providing every student a tailored plan of services and enrichments to address the student’s needs, strengths, and interests. We are delighted to share this approach to ‘whole child education,’ and to bring it to bear on poverty’s impact within Ireland’s high performing school system.”
Read more about this exciting new endeavor here.
Connect Indy Dashboard Launch
City Connects matches students with in- and out-of-school resources to provide opportunities that build on their strengths and address the challenges they face. In doing this, City Connects collects information that can be compiled and viewed across a school, and now, across a community.
In November, the City of Indianapolis, in partnership with Marian University’s Center for Vibrant Schools, City Connects, and the Center for Thriving Children, launched ConnectIndy, a new data dashboard that showcases City Connects data from nearly 30 Indianapolis schools. The data—which can be viewed at the school level, neighborhood level, or city level—is based on City Connects’ personalized student support plans and tracks students’ top strengths, needs, and interests, services received by students, and barriers to services. The dashboard also features a city-wide resource map.
A look at the dashboard shows that the top interests of students across the city are video games, cooking, and art and that students need the most support in reading, writing, and math. The dashboard also highlights that some of the most common barriers to receiving services are insurance coverage, transportation, and the need for a translator.
Communities can use this information to better serve students and their families. This could lead to enhanced partnerships focused on literacy and math, improvements in transportation or translation, opening up kitchen facilities to afterschool programs, and collaborations with local theater, film, dance, and visual arts organizations, for example.
Progress Report
City Connects released its newest biennial Progress Report this fall, detailing new evidence of positive impacts on students and the program’s continued growth. It also describes how the City Connects Coordinators, Program Managers, Community Partners, and educators work together to construct comprehensive, customized, coordinated, and continuous support for children to thrive and grow.
New evidence shows that City Connects also helps students and schools with a perennial challenge: over-identification of students for special education, an issue with significant implications for racial equity and school finances. A recent study shows that City Connects improves the accuracy of special education referrals, ensuring that limited resources go to the students who truly need them while providing improved support for students who don’t have underlying special educational needs.
Read more about City Connects and new evidence of its impact here.
A Webinar Explores How To Help Children Thrive
This spring, the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, the home of City Connects, hosted a webinar called “Helping Children Thrive in an Age of Uncertainty.”
The webinar is a dynamic conversation that addresses the question: “In this time of historic uncertainty and challenge, what does it mean for children to ‘thrive,’ and what will it take to promote thriving in enduring and equitable ways?”
The discussion draws on the work of talented academics and their visionary ideas of what thriving could mean. It touches on the importance of joy, flourishing, and having the opportunity to dream.
Publications
The Center released many notable publications this year. Below, we highlight four that showcase major research studies and some of the ways we work in collaboration with other universities and child and youth-serving organizations.
Study on opportunity gap
The number of educational opportunities that children accrue at home, in early education and care, at school, in afterschool programs, and in their communities as they grow up are strongly linked to their educational attainment and earnings in early adulthood, according to new research published recently by AERA’s Educational Researcher.
The results indicate that the opportunity gaps between low- and high-income households from birth through the end of high school largely explain differences in educational and income achievement between students from different backgrounds.
These findings come from a 26-year longitudinal study led by Center for Thriving Children Executive Director Eric Dearing (Boston College). His co-authors were Andres S. Bustamante (University of California–Irvine), Henrik D. Zachrisson (University of Oslo), and Deborah Lowe Vandell (University of California–Irvine).
New evidence of integrated student support impact on student achievement
AERAOpen, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, recently published new evidence that integrated student support, as delivered by City Connects, narrows academic achievement gaps. The “Effects of Integrated Student Support on Elementary School Achievement,” a synthetic randomized control trial, is authored by Jordan Lawson.
This study finds that students who were randomly assigned to schools with City Connects in kindergarten scored higher on statewide Math and ELA tests than their peers randomly assigned to comparison schools, most robustly in fifth grade. It adds to prior evidence of City Connects’ efficacy because it creates a synthetic randomized control trial that allows for the creation of treatment and control groups for City Connects and non-City Connects students by using the random component of a large urban district’s school enrollment system. By comparing similar students in City Connects and non-City Connects elementary schools, researchers can estimate the effects of City Connects.
It finds that students who attended elementary schools with City Connects demonstrated higher academic achievement. Effect sizes indicated that student achievement improved by as much as 20 percent, which is equivalent to about 90 percent of the average estimated Black-White achievement gap and about 50 percent of the estimated gap between students from high- and low-income families.
A toolkit to empower policymakers to use research and practice
Policymakers do the critical work of creating the context – the rules, budgets, and priorities – that schools and districts work within. To help policymakers use the latest insights from research and practice to encourage schools to build effective systems of integrated student support, we released the second edition of our Integrated Student Support State Policy Toolkit.
The toolkit was created by the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, part of Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, as well as by City Connects, which is part of the Center, and by Communities in Schools, a national nonprofit organization that connects students to “caring adults and community resources.”
Strengthening Whole Family Comprehensive Supports in Early Childhood
Children thrive when families have the support they need. We know that a whole-child approach is working for school-age students. But what about our youngest children? What impact does holistic support have on infants, toddlers, and preschoolers?
To answer this question, the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children teamed up with leaders from the University of Connecticut’s Applied Research on Children Lab and the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. This partnership led to a new report, Strengthening Whole Family and Comprehensive Supports in Early Childhood, that delves into what we know about the impacts of access to comprehensive services for young children and their families and insights into best practices. It also provides recommendations for policymakers supporting early education and care programs including Head Start and Early Head Start.
In the News
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe ran a feature story on the work City Connects is doing in Boston Public Schools. It discussed City Connects’ efficacy, saying, “Studies have shown that the program works. Students at City Connects schools — there are more than 100 across the United States and in Ireland — score better on tests and graduate at higher rates than their peers at similar high-poverty schools. And the results persist. One study found that City Connects reduced the dropout rate of Black and Latino boys by half, while another found it increased college completion rates by half.”
City Connects executive director Mary Walsh had a letter to the editor published in the Boston Globe this spring. In it, she wrote a response to an op-ed, calling for a more comprehensive understanding of how to think about mental health.
A Nation At Risk at 40
City Connects was mentioned in the report, A Nation At Risk at 40. The new report is a collection of essays that consider “lessons to be learned from the past forty years of reform” and from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. City Connects is featured in an essay titled “A Survey of Whole-Child School Reforms” by Maria D. Fitzpatrick, an economics and public policy professor at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy.
Critical Conditions
Finally, City Connects was discussed in a new book, Critical Conditions. In the new book, Elaine Weiss, Bruce Levine, and Kimberly Sterin outline successful strategies for whole child and whole community support that can help school systems meet broader student needs in times of disruption. The work draws on extensive research on integrated student support theory and practice, as well as case studies of five very different communities across the United States, including Salem, Massachusetts, where City Connects has been implemented for six years.
